Data Parallelism in Algorithms
Data-parallel algorithms exploit the parallelism inherent in many large data structures.
- A problem is an (identical) algorithm applied to multiple points in data “array”
- Usually iterate over such “updates”
Features of Data Parallelism
- Scalable parallelism -- can often get million or more way parallelism
- Hard to express when “geometry” irregular or dynamic
Note data-parallel algorithms can be expressed by ALL programming models (Message Passing, HPF like, openMP like)